The Dark Sister Book

Enjoyed this cerebral mash-up of meta-writing, philosophy, psychology, ghost-(or is it "spirit")-yarn/mystery, and send-up provocation that Goldstein cleverly double-plots through the intertwined stories of two sets of sisters, one fair, one dark, Hedda and Stella, of the contemprorary world (and thus the controlling narrative voice, via author/narrator Hedda), and Alice and Vivianna, of the early 20th century, living in a large, brooding, tower-dominated house in the hills of northwestern Connecticut, and with whom the psychologist-philosopher William James becomes involved. Through the personage of James's thus arrives the central conceit of the narrative: Henry-Jamesian prose. Goldstein is smitten with the literature of the 19th century and writes Hedda as equally smitten. Moreover, here, in Hedda's novel-in-progress, eponymously entitled The Dark Sister, she (or both...as in both author and character...there's more than a bit of self-referential meta- here) is a bit of a magpie, pinching words, phrases, and diction from Henry and the occasional collateral Victorian contemporary. (Goldstein prefaces her story by acknowledging the authors and titles of which she is confident Hedda is aware, and a brief prologue of James-family sketches and quotations.)

I docked the novel a star - actually, a half-star - for MacArthur-Fellow Goldstein's too, too ostensible pedantry, her show-offy delight in obscure words - words down in the lowest usage-frequency percentiles - and references, and her sometimes plodding, text-booky style. (I had to look up sthenic, borborygmus, lanuginous, and six or seven other Greek or Latinate terms that stumped me...you know when your tummy gurgles - what Mommy used to say was "your stomach talking to you"? Gastroenterologists know this as "borborygmus" - accent on the third syllable, "ryg"). A reviewer might easily have written all this off as satirical - Hedda, the primary voice, is sensitive about never having gone to college, and she has a habit of jotting mental nota benes when she encounters words she MUST find occasion to use, words like "ossuous" and "embrocate." But I elected to choose pedanticism over satirical intent and what struck me as William James's more technical phrasing over Henry James's dreamier lapidary prose. The novel is broken up into 17 mostly short chapters, a few of which are fairly sprightly but the majority of which tend at some point to slog in an over-expository way.

Even so, Goldstein is a close observer and careful depicter of humans and landscapes and all manner of organic matter. She sees into, and through, things. She has a philosopher's care for language as the vehicle of transmitted comprehension. She drops a handful of witty bons mots. And she made me want to return to Henry James and to read Alice James's diary and letters as well as Charlotte Bronte's Villette, and to finally take down from the shelf Ingrid Rowland's biography of Giordano Bruno that's been glaring down at me for nearly a decade.

That's not bad from a novel that won't be for every taste but will suit a variety of tastes, like mine